College Dropout Wally Baram Takes Campus by Storm in ‘Overcompensating’

As a child, Overcompensating star Wally Baram didn’t dream of becoming an actor. “I had this lark that I wanted to be a cowgirl,” she tells Vanity Fair over Zoom. So, Baram did what anyone with dreams of cattle driving would do: “I went to this school in Ojai where you got a great education and also learned Western equestrianism.”

Unfortunately, biology prevented Baram from becoming the next Annie Oakley. “I am five one. My feet don’t even curve around a horse,” she says. “The horse looks like it’s wearing me as a hat.”

Thank goodness for that. Now the 27-year-old writer and comedian has found her calling starring as Carmen, an awkward freshman at the fictional Yates University, in Prime Video’s Overcompensating. Even before the series from internet content creator turned TV star Benito Skinner premiered on May 15, Overcompensating was getting awards attention—it’s already earned Gotham TV Awards nominations for best breakthrough comedy series and best lead performance in a comedy, for Skinner.

Baram can hardly believe the heated reception. “There are so many different ways for an online creator to then make a show and not get the flowers…so many different ways in which I think his work and his art and his skill could be trivialized,” she says of Skinner. “I really hope he just gets seen for everything that he is, because I’m constantly in awe of that guy.”

Before signing on for Overcompensating, Baram had never met Skinner—unlike other series regulars like Mary Beth Barone, who plays Skinner’s deadpan older sister, Grace, and cohosts the hit comedy podcast Ride with him in real life. She also had to overcome another, slightly larger obstacle: “I had never acted on camera before getting cast as the colead in Overcompensating.”

She did, however, have performing experience. After ditching her cowgirl dreams in high school, Baram decided to take a gap year and went all in on stand-up comedy. She pored over books by comedians like Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, and Mindy Kaling, and stalked more of her favorite comedy voices online. “I used to have a joke about it when I was 19, part of the punchline was like, ‘I spend my afternoons googling where Jason Sudeikis went to college,’” Baram says. “I studied them, and I had the resources to study, fortunately.”

But after making headway in the Los Angeles comedy community, she moved to New York to start her freshman year at Barnard. It didn’t stick. “I was like, Nah, this is not the vibe,” she says. “I had this experience in comedy that I felt like I had found my people, and then I was supposed to recreate it…I didn’t even give myself the chance. I walked in with my walls up, for sure.” So after a year, she dropped out and returned to LA to do comedy full time.

Baram slowly worked her way up the ladder—booking the coveted comedy festival Just for Laughs, performing a set on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, and joining the writers room on shows like What We Do in the Shadows and Shrinking. Eventually, the pilot for Overcompensating came across her desk—and, ironically, dropping out of college gave Baram a fresh perspective for a comedy about campus life.